The Virginian-Pilot
©
NORFOLK
More than a year after the Virginia Port Authority shifted container operations away from Portsmouth Marine Terminal, a future use for the site remains uncertain.
Plans to build a $25 million warehouse to be used by a paper and pulp distributor fell through after engineers found the ground there was not strong enough to handle the heavy rolls of paper.
Several companies have stepped forward to propose uses for the mostly vacant terminal on the Elizabeth River, including an affiliate of construction firm Skanska USA Inc., industrial developer CenterPoint Properties Trust, and alternative energy companies, port officials said at its Board of Commissioners meeting on Tuesday.
Portsmouth Marine Terminal had been one of the Port Authority's most active facilities until it leased the nearby APM Terminals Virginia in July 2010 and shifted container operations from its old terminal to the newer one.
Skanska is among several firms in a consortium that has proposed a $1.9 billion project to build a parallel Midtown Tunnel, extend the Martin Luther King Freeway, and improve the Downtown Tunnel between Norfolk and Portsmouth.
The company wants to lease 60 acres at the 219-acre Portsmouth site for five years during the tunnel project, officials said.
Negotiations with Skanska are completed, but the lease cannot go forward until the consortium finalizes its deal to build the tunnel with the Virginia Department of Transportation, said Jerry Bridges, the Port Authority's executive director.
While the Skanska lease represents a short-term use for the site, CenterPoint's proposal to lease land and build a 500,000-square-foot warehouse there could be a viable long-term use, Bridges said.
But negotiations with the Chicago-area industrial real estate company are stuck on a price for the lease, he said.
CenterPoint is developing a 920-acre warehouse park just west of downtown Suffolk. It also was one of several firms that bid to take over the port operations of the Virginia Port Authority before the state abandoned the possibility of privatization.
Other companies have proposed smaller uses of the Portsmouth site, including a firm that wants to use seven acres to manufacture wood pellets or chips that are burned to generate energy, Bridges said.
Another proposal has come from an affiliate of Spanish wind-energy company Gamesa, which wants to use five or six acres there for operations related to the development of wind energy systems, he said.
Gamesa established a site in Chesapeake nearly a year ago, and about 50 engineers from the energy company and Newport News Shipbuilding are working on prototypes for offshore wind turbines.
While smaller proposals for the Portsmouth site represent good opportunities to reuse the location, the authority is leery of parceling out the site piecemeal and missing out on an opportunity for a large user, said Joe Harris, a port spokesman.
None of the companies with proposals would begin using the site before January or February, Bridges said.
Also at the meeting Tuesday, the Port Authority approved a proposal to refinance roughly $110 million in bonds and a $315,403 payment to settle a wrongful termination dispute with the estate of a former trade representative for the port who was working in Brazil.
Josh Brown, (757) 446-2318, josh.brown@pilotonline.com
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PHOTOTROPE IS RIGHT
Craney Island, the big square thing that takes up half the river between Portsmouth and Hampton , is an atrocity.
Why dump toxic dredge in a huge pile in the middle of Hampton Roads?
The right answer has always been to dump it way out in the ocean.
They will have to do that eventually once the Craney toxic mountain gets too big to continue building, so why not do it now?
Building huge dredge islands in the river is just destroying the river and ecology.
pmt
The article stated that PMT was a busy port and that was not the truth. What is the truth though is that millions of dollars were wasted on the Kone cranes.... money was spent to raise them, install diesel generators, rewire, and paint them. They then let them sit there,never use them and watch them rust!!!As we sit here there is a company cutting up some of the older cranes at PMT,and they have already cut up port cranes at NNMT and running transtainers at NIT.The VPA and upper management of the port need to be accountable for poor decision making and the waste of taxpayers money.Craney island.... a money pit and huge mistake. They then have the nerve to vote themselves big bonuses and are laughing all the way to the bank.Fire them all!!!
Portsmouth city council
Better check with Portsmouth city council first--they have a plan to increase minority business with the city and they might want to find some deserving "underrepresented" person who needs this opportunity.
Why Expand Craney Island?
PMT was a completely usable terminal - not perfect and not the most modern in the country, but this article admits it was "one of the Port Authority's most active facities". Instead of simply maintaining and upgrading it, the Port Authority decides to spend hundreds of millions of dollars filling in half the Elizabeth River to build a new terminal next to Craney Island. And the Corps of Engineers agrees to spend millions of tax dollars to help them do it!?! The citizens, the boaters and fishermen and folks who just want to restore the Elizabeth, permanently lose a thousand acres of the cleanest part of the river and the Port Authority just walks away from PMT and now they're having trouble finding any other use for it. What a waste.